Notes on District Matters
In these latter and highly-favoured days we have “a short and easy method of dealing with ghosts and spirits. It is not as it was in the days of the Cock Lane ghost, of famous memory. Our fathers could only listen with awe and fear and trembling to the ghostly noises. Since then we have found out that such noises are “spiritual manifestations,” and if they disturb our slumbers or imperil our equanimity, all we have to do is to call in a “medium,” and forthwith we are rid of our ghostly visitors. Quite recently a case in point has occurred at Moxley.
Some months ago an unfortunate puddler met with an accident, which brought on a succession of epileptic fits. About three weeks after the occurrence of the accident strange rappings and noises of an extraordinary character were heard from time to time in the poor man’s bed-room. The whole neighbourhood came to hear the “uncanny” sounds. Nobody could account for them; and eventually so great was the annoyance that the puddler’s family removed to another house.
The noises, however, followed them to their new abode; and more alarming, and more extraordinary still, pieces of furniture, Bibles, jugs of butter-milk, glasses, etc., began to move from one place to another “without the intervention of any visible agency.” No wonder the poor people were in perplexity, and the neighbours spoke with bated breath of the mysterious proceeding in Geo. Paddock’s house.
At last “a highly susceptible Medium” heard of the affair, and paid a visit to the haunted house. The mystery was solved at once. The spirits of two former associates of Paddock were “at the bottom of the whole affair.” Mr Medium talked to them like a father, with the very satisfactory result that the spirits “engaged to go quietly away and not to return.”
But that is not all. Paddock had been in a fit and quite unconscious for sixteen hours, but immediately the spirits took their departure he opened his eyes, stated that he felt better, came down stairs, and ate the first hearty meal he had taken from the time of the accident, some four months ago. Mr Home’s sailing about a room three or four feet from the ground on a chair is nothing to this.
Birmingham Daily Gazette, 25th January 1869.